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January 2010

I was re-reading the proposed topic area I had suggested to IFTF a couple years ago on Generation X Leadership style, and how it's particularly appropriate in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world.

At the end I point out that while unfettered nationalism was the pivotal issue for Boomers, it was unfettered corporatism that was the pivotal issue for GenX.

But after meeting someone from the Social-M Challenge, that got me thinking: and what is if to Millenials?

I might guess that it's unfettered duty - when we blend work and livelihood, is there ever anything that isn't urgent? do high-functioning millenials get ANY downtime? Is everything about goals and multitasking? If seven activities are good, 14 must be better? Or is it about unfettered rationality: if everything from video to storytelling to comics are co-opted to be purposeful, where is soulfulness?

The clip that has me reposting here (something I don't do too often) is this excerpt from King's final presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

"One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and
power have usually been contrasted as opposites - polar opposites - so
that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a
denial of love...What is needed is a realization that power without
love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and
anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice,
and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands
against love."

Here are my forecasts. The gist is this: it's going to be a decade of transformative change, and if we get stuck in the transitions, we'll protract the agony. If we can agree on broad goals and a process -- a life -- that involves respecting the journey to meet those goals and the people we travel with on our roads, then we may see some amazingly wonderful things emerge.

(1) Community and Government: Regardless of financial stability, social systems will crumble. Schools will bifurcate into "bare necessity" and "elite." At least one emergency (but probably several) will point out just how utterly incapable our medical system is at caring for everyday, insured middle class working people when large masses need hospitalization. Protective services (fire, police) will similarly face a few overwhelmingly impossible tasks because of weather-, earthquake- or social unrest-related crises.

The emerging solution to this will be that young people ("digital natives"), marshalled by the middle-aged ("diversity natives") will reach across the socio-economic aisles as never before. The challenges are so pervasive that only collaborative teams will be able to address them, and team-creation is easier than ever.

Look for alliances: alliances among young adults to solve specific innovation challenges; alliances between educational and other services to provide emergency resources; alliances to share personal resources, skills and expertise that tie communities back together again.

(2) Finance and Regulatory: Financial stability won't happen. No, not for the whole decade; not until the uncertainty surrounding global warming, toxicity, and other health issues are addressed -- at a minimum. In fact, an entirely new financial system -- or rather set of systems -- will continue to develop. It will be like "the internet in the 1990's" where decreasing numbers of people think the new system is a fad but the technology just isn't quite there to bring everyone on and up to speed.

That's called Social Entrepreneurship and Social Capitalism, and is represented by some amazing innovations that run the gamut from reinventing the traditional (investing a philanthropy's endowment is far more powerful as a social change agent than the relatively small amount they give away as grant money) to the novel (new risk management exchanges -- like the Housing Index, or the Peace Index), and the hybrid mechanisms of evaluating (paradoxically real) intangible assets and removing the focus from the abstraction, "money."

Look for innovations in just about everything, from traditional philanthropies treated as financial funds, grant money coming from for-profits, to new instruments like "social bonds," new exchanges, and the merging of data as it flows across the boundaries between corporate, governmental, and community organizations.

(3) Personal: Love and loving will continue to become increasingly traditional, with women shouldering immense caretaking loads due to smaller families that are widely spread out, higher incidence of everything from asthma to autism and alzheimers. Women will want to marry earlier and choose again according to "prospects" rather than sensitivity; men will want to capture younger women. Boomers will pool their resources and recreate communes where at least some children will be enlisted to provide caretaking services.

Amidst the resurgence of spirituality, where people recommit to some sort of faith: faith in God or society or their family, will be an eventual understanding of who is NOT the enemy. As people from the LGBT community, as immigrants, and as people formerly known as "minority" become included in the real work of monitoring and healing society, empathy will increase.

That said, the tolerance for uniqueness, "Too Much Information," will continue to contract. People will consider themselves very transparent but share less and less. A lot of us will block much from ourselves. The small children will watch this.

Look for a resurgence in the arts -- people who reconnect adults to their emotions -- for 2030.